LNER increases weekend first by £10
 

LNER, the rail operator between London and Scotland along the East Coast route, has increased their weekend first fares by £10. It is now either £25 or £35 rather than £15 or £25.
There's still a cut down first class service on a weekend with no hot food or alcohol offered.
Personally I'd prefer they scrapped weekend first and offer a consistent 7 days a week service. Unless other operators has also increased their prices at the same time this now makes LNER the most expensive operator to upgrade on a weekend.
On a weekday you can bid for upgrades starting from £5 and the weekday service includes hot food all day and alcohol after 11am.

I don't know, I could pay £25+Avios LCY-EDI, get there quicker and then get free champage :)

I wonder if this is in preparation for their new trains that have more standard class seats but fewer first class (as has been the trend lately).

Perhaps it's to drive more people towards Seatfrog, so they can control the upgrade capacity, rather than have a free-for-all.

are they still using seatfrog? it's been over a year since i had any email promoting use of it, last time was when virgin were still doing it. the last few promotional upgrade emails i have had have been directly from lner and inviting me to sit in first and pay the supplement (~£25 I think) directly to the on board staff.

Seatfrog is weekdays only. The reason was because they had cheap upgrades on a weekend anyway.
It's a good argument to ditch weekend first and have a consistent product 7 days a week.

Virgin Westcoast went up to £25 a couple of weeks ago also.

That happened well over a year ago. £10 Rugby down to London, from there up, I'm not sure when the £15 cost of upgrade stops, I suspect from Preston onwards its £25. Been that way for a while.

When they first charged me this (£15 vs £10 from Wolverhampton), they had started doing sandwich on the weekend, from just tea/coffee/snackbox. The conductor said they were going to do alcohol included in the upgrade at the weekends, but that was a long time ago and never appeared. Most of the time on a weekend you end up just going to the buffet and getting stuff from there, anyway, and nobody does the at seat service.

Prices increased by £5 across the board a few weeks ago - it's now a minimum of £15, and e.g., £20 for London to Wolverhampton.

Ah, I didn't realise that, not been on the route for a while. I take it they still haven't brought in alcohol? Because they're pricing it far more than a typical 20:03 London to Wolverhampton First Class advance which is about £24 total. On most days of the week.

It does seem like the last days of Virgin West Coast. They did decent sales near Easter, mid July and just before Christmas for quite a few years. Last sale seen was July 18. All lot of the typical pre peak advances disappeared too about a year ago, getting something like a 13:23 from London became rare if impossible. I think they knew the franchise was done and they're just milking whatever out of it.